EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

How does petty corruption affect tax morale in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Björn Jahnke and Reinhard Weisser

European Journal of Political Economy, 2019, vol. 60, issue C

Abstract: Revenues from taxation gain in importance to finance economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. One obstacle to enhancing the willingness to remit taxes can be the extortion of bribes by public officials. Using micro-level data from the Afrobarometer, we show that petty corruption erodes tax morale. The effect on tax morale is more severe in countries and regions where fewer people are affected by petty corruption and becomes insignificant if extortion of bribes is particularly prevalent. Differing levels of civic participation and potential access to tax funded services are also found to induce heterogeneous reactions to corruption experience. Applying a mediation analysis, we demonstrate that petty corruption not only has a direct effect on tax morale but also diminishes confidence in tax authorities and therefore affects tax morale indirectly. The harmful effects of corruption experience, however, operate mainly through a generally lowered inclination to uphold high levels of tax morale.

Keywords: Corruption; Tax morale; Effect heterogeneity; Mediation analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 H26 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268017303816
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:60:y:2019:i:c:s0176268017303816

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2018.09.003

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:poleco:v:60:y:2019:i:c:s0176268017303816